


There's A Road Left Behind Me

by annamorris



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: EFA Fic Challenge 2020, F/F, Implied/Referenced Neglect, Nicole Haught Backstory, Nicole-centric, and very deliberate apostrophe placement, i know how to use commas i swear, like a lot of rocks, rocks, unrealistic depictions of geology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25814203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annamorris/pseuds/annamorris
Summary: For Waverly, it's all in the smile and wave. For Nicole, it's letting the current take her.Or, the one where Nicole is a rock, and people keep leaving her.+++Set pre-show through the end of S3.
Relationships: Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught
Comments: 15
Kudos: 152





	There's A Road Left Behind Me

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when you try to write a coming of age fic in 4k words. I promise the voice shift is intentional.
> 
> Thank you to EFA Podcast for the challenge and the prompt.

It don’t take much time after meeting Nicole Haught to realize she’s an odd duck. That much were clear from the moment she arrived in the world on the floor of a beat-up motorhome somewhere just west of Ottawa. She weren’t wailin’ or strugglin’, no. Rather, she just gazed up at two unprepared parents with eyes as wide as the moon and irises that contained galaxies.

Nicole spent her early years rewindin’ the same dozen cassettes and noddin’ her head to the same beat. Her little family drove all across Canada, while she pretended she were a great explorer like the ones in the stars, scoutin’ uncharted territory and discoverin’ the great secrets of the world. 

By age five, Nicole’s hair hung down to her waist and she could make or break camp in ten minutes flat, somethin’ she were rather proud of. Not that anyone asked. She carried with her an extensive pebble and feather collection, and yes, she knew which feathers came from which species, thank ya very much. 

At age six, she went and met her aunt and uncle when her parents dropped her off in a town called Purgatory. It weren’t much of anythin’, Nicole decided, certainly not compared to the vast mountains to the west or the fjords to the north. There, she could hide within the stony cracks if she wanted to, each crevice in the rock filled with the secrets of millennia. How easy it were to feel small among giants. 

Here, the land spread out uninterrupted in every direction, dried grasses yellowin’ under the sun. There weren’t no place to hide on the plains, and there weren’t no place for secrets on the open prairie. 

Turned out there were a place for a music festival on the prairie, though, and Nicole went and found herself sittin’ in the cradle of coniferous tree roots with instructions not to move. She made it about two minutes and forty-seven seconds watchin’ people mill about in long flowy skirts and beaded hair, who lit little pipes that didn’t smell real nice.

The roots beneath the soil stirred. 

The sun just touched the horizon when Nicole stumbled upon the river, orange rays settin' the water alight. A canoe were docked a little ways downstream. 

Nicole didn’t remember fallin’ asleep in the bottom of the boat, but she remembered wakin’ up in the dark to the jolt of bein’ on the water and hot air and smoke and screams so loud they coulda shattered glass. She pressed calloused hands over her ears and hugged boney knees to her chest and tried to ignore the poundin’ of her heart. 

When the screamin’ finally quieted and the canoe stopped movin’, Nicole dared look over the edge of her liferaft. She sat still as a rock and tried to silence her sobs until the sunrise threw long shadows and the birds started singin’. 

In the morning, a sheriff’s deputy came across a little girl, not seven years old, curled up in the bottom of a canoe starin’ up at him with big moon eyes filled with a ferocious fear. 

“I ain’t gonna hurt you,” the man said, “can ya tell me your name?” Calculatin’ silence were his response. The man put his hands on his duty belt. “Well, my name’s Randy, and I’m with the Purgatory Sheriff’s Department.” He paused. “Seems like you’ve got yourself a little lost. You know where your parents are?”

Nicole shook her head, which seemed to surprise Randy. 

“Well, uh, I’m gonna help ya find ‘em. It’s gonna be okay, sweetheart. It okay if I call ya ‘sweetheart?’” 

Nicole hesitated, then shook her head again.

“I gotta call ya somethin’ now, don’t I? You prefer darlin’? Muffin? Sweet potato? Ya sure got the hair for it.”

Nicole giggled, which made Randy smile, and his mustache quirked. It looked like a caterpillar.

“Nicole,” Nicole whispered. “Name’s Nicole.”

“Pleasure to meet ya, Nicole,” Randy said, extendin’ a hand to help her up. “How ‘bout we go get ya a real muffin?” 

+++

After that night in the little town called Purgatory, Nicole’s dreams weren’t what they used to be. All of a sudden, the tall mountains and deep valleys and all the secrets in them were tinged with soot and the wind with the shrieks of the damned. A forest fire, they told her, but that weren’t how Nicole remembered it.

One day her daddy sat her down and said they’d start stayin’ put next month ‘cause it was time for Nicole to go to school. She weren’t too sure what for since she seemed to be doin’ just fine, thank ya very much. Her daddy just laughed at her and said he weren’t too happy about it neither, but she needed to know math so she could count the stars.

They parked their home on a plot of land that was one of a small cluster set out in the middle of the woods. All the folks there seemed real friendly, even if it did mean Nicole had to walk a mile to the bus stop every day. And, at night, when the weather were good and the season was right, folks would gather round a big pit and have a bonfire.

The smoke made Nicole’s big moon eyes water and smart and she tried not to hear crashin' footsteps and wisps of screams between the trees. She weren’t too fond of fire. 

+++

On her first day of school at six-and-a-half years old, Nicole walked herself to her bus stop and climbed the steps with scuffed shoes and a pocketful of pebbles. She sat in the row behind the driver ‘cause she liked bein’ able to see out in front of her. And the kids in the back were bein’ far too rowdy for her likin’. Nobody warned her 'bout how loud kids were. 

Sweat stuck her thighs to the fake leather seat. It left strange twistin’ patterns on the back of her legs that almost formed the roadmaps she loved to look at when there weren’t nothin' worth seein’ outside her window.

“Thank ya, ma’am,” she said to the bus driver as she passed. The old woman with silver braids watched a lanky little girl pause at the bottom of the steps and take a deep breath before marchin' into the single-story brick school with the blind determination of someone set on makin’ a questionable decision. 

Boy, she thought the bus was bad. Nobody warned her 'bout the ruckus of a hundred children in new outfits and styled hair runnin' through cinderblock hallways. Why’d they all feel like they had to talk when there weren’t no one listenin'? 

Her mama told her she was in someone called Miss Cordillera’s class, but hell if Nicole knew where to find her, and she sure couldn’t see any roadmaps pasted to the walls. 

Through a series of events not worth mentionin’, she found herself sittin’ in a yellow plastic chair that squeaked on dirty linoleum and caught her hair in cracks that came outta nowhere next to a little boy who couldn’t stop movin'. He swung his legs in wide arcs and kicked their shared tablespace and made the whole thing shake until a pretty lady nicely asked him to stop. 

Nicole quite liked the nice pretty lady with the chirpy voice and a skirt so green she could blend in with treetops. And, when the pretty lady introduced herself as Miss Cordillera, well, Nicole decided then and there that, just maybe, school weren’t goin’ to be so awful.

+++

School were a whole heck of a lotta sittin' and very little adventurin’. Sure there were building blocks and colored pencils that felt too big in tiny hands and thirty minutes a day to climb up and down the same metal jungle gym a hundred times, but there weren’t no freedom in any of it. There weren’t no place for secrets on wood chips and asphalt.

Nicole found a nice spot of weeds that took to growin’ through a slatted fence at the far end of the schoolyard. She took out her favorite pebbles, warmed by the heat of her thigh, and held ‘em in her palm as she tried to remember where she found each one. She heard the delighted shrieks of her classmates chasin’ each other in an endless game, but she couldn’t say she felt any interest in joinin’ ‘em. For what it were worth, they didn’t seem to have any interest in the quiet girl with giraffe legs and flame-red hair neither. 

On the bus ride back to her little home in the woods, Nicole listened to the kids behind her pushin’ and shovin’, and she couldn’t help thinkin’ again about people feelin’ the need to talk for no one but themself. She could hear herself in her head just fine, thank ya very much. 

She got home to a quiet house and laid in the yard and reveled in the silence. She decided she weren’t too fond of school. She weren’t too fond of being trapped between walls as a matter of fact. She told her mama as much, and she said she and Nicole’s daddy must’ve done somethin’ right. 

+++

“Please go put your rocks in your bookbag,” Miss Cordillera said about a month into the new school year. Nicole still weren’t too fond of school, but she also weren’t too certain about countin’ the stars, so she figured she oughta stick it out while longer.

“No thank ya, ma’am.” Nicole continued stackin’ her pebbles one on top of the other as if the pretty lady who wore a new blue skirt hadn’t spoken at all. “I ain’t got a bookbag anyhow.”

“You don’t have a bookbag,” Miss Cordillera repeated, only a little surprised that a child called her ‘ma’am.’ 

“No, ma’am.”

“Put them in your lunchpail then.”

Nicole shrugged. “Don’t got one.”

“You buy lunch?”

“No, ma’am.” Nicole unstacked her pebbles, still not looking up. Somewhere, a building block tower collapsed and caused mayhem.

“You eat lunch?”

“No, ma’am.”

Miss Cordillera looked at the beanpole of a girl with long red hair and worn-through tennis shoes and let her play with her pebbles. 

Every day after that, Nicole came into her classroom to find a peanut butter sandwich wrapped in wax paper on her chair. Somethin’ warm and tender sprouted that day, and Nicole decided that there were room for secrets tucked between plastic seats and plain white walls. 

Some days, she returned to an empty home, but some nights, someone were there to wipe her tears as nightmares of flames danced behind her eyes. She supposed she liked havin’ a family like hers, even if they didn’t pick her up from school with hugs and minivans like her classmates.

+++

By the third grade, Nicole stood five feet tall and could count the stars up to a thousand. She coulda swore there were more of them when she was a little spitfire runnin' through the Canadian wilderness. But Mr. Chersky spoke of somethin’ called light pollution, and Nicole supposed that might have somethin’ to do with it. 

By the third grade, she couldn’t make or break camp in ten minutes anymore, but she could cook a mean pot of macaroni and cheese, thank ya very much. The problem were she weren’t too sure how to cook much else, and the money she got from doin’ odd jobs couldn’t buy her much more than a few boxes of Kraft a week when her parents were off travelin’ god-knows-where. 

By the third grade, Nicole was beginnin’ to realize she weren’t quite clickin’ with the other kids. She picked up pretty early on that eight-year-olds didn’t have much interest in pebbles and dreams of fire and findin’ out the secrets of the world. But school felt a bit like gettin’ all dressed up for a fancy masquerade ball in a special suit and frilly mask and steppin’ off the bus to realize everyone else were wearin’ a dress. 

She had acquaintances - a word she learned from last week’s spellin’ quiz and kept ‘cause it felt like peppermint candy in her mouth - but she didn’t have friends per se. She didn’t have a phone at home, but she figured no one woulda called her if she did. And that was just fine by her. Bein’ left out were easier than havin’ to figure out how to talk to aliens. 

Until it weren’t.

There came a time when pebbles and stars and dreams weren’t worth the effort of not fittin’ with her peers. She didn’t have much tryin’ left in her if she were bein’ real honest. Just enough to get by. But gettin’ by weren't livin’. So Nicole made a choice. 

Science class told her about weatherin’ rock. How it chips and breaks, and how the ocean tosses and turns stone and sand and smooths it out over years and years and that’s how it loses its secrets. Nicole’s heart wore away just a little, weathered by a hostile ocean, and road maps and stars became a little fainter. 

+++

The next day, her pebbles stayed under her pillow. Rough edges became a little less rough. 

An illusion was created, a flat front put up. Water put out nightmares of fire. 

It turned out people invited smooth rocks to birthday parties. Who knew.

+++

A number of years passed with thoughts of friendship bracelets and sleepovers and cigarette smoke and the blessing of companionship in its many forms.

+++

Nicole was seventeen years old when she kissed a girl for the first time. Her name was Sierra like the mountains, and she tasted like cherry lip balm and smelled like clean laundry, and Nicole felt like someone took a chisel to her chest. It was strange and new and altogether rather exciting for her. But it frightened her, too. One chip could spread into a perilous network of uncertainty.

Her first kiss became her first date, which became her first girlfriend, which became her first time, and it was like finding rose quartz in a creekbed. 

Another vein webbed off from the source.

But cuddled close in a twin bed with floral cotton sheets, Nicole could not bring herself to mind. Not when someone had finally picked her up after tumbling for so long with the pull of the current. 

+++

Nicole diverged from her parents’ path, if one could call wandering in any direction that felt pleasing a path, and followed her friends to college. Yes, she had friends, thank you very much. It only took her an entire academic career.

Sierra broke up with her two days before she was meant to head home for winter break. For once, Nicole was grateful her parents had packed up the trailer and driven off to the mountains the moment she graduated. It was certainly not the first time they left, but this time, they took the only place Nicole had ever called home with them. 

It hurt. God, did it hurt. It was like leaving a hurricane and floating on top of the waves only to be caught in a rip current.

Nicole knew there were three ways to escape a riptide. First, swim sideways and hope you make it out before the exhaustion sets in. Second, let the current pull you until it eventually spits you out miles from shore. Third, drown. 

Nicole was never one to give up.

She picked up a chisel and struck a blow that chipped away at her own illusion. She chipped and chipped until she no longer felt smooth and tumbled. She could feel the beginnings of ridges and valleys long brushed away. A dam broke, and trickles became streams. She tasted the clouds, and it weren’t nothing like cherry lip balm.

+++

It tasted a little like cheap alcohol and a big win at the slot machines and a wedding that meant nothing.

But sometimes, exploring meant getting a little lost along the way, and every tumble, every misstep, every laugh that was just a little too loud sculpted rivers and turned ravines into canyons.

+++

Nicole graduated with a cat named Calamity and a double major in Geology and Criminal Justice because she quite liked the idea of shaping her community rather than letting it shape her. She joined the police academy after graduation and damn near gave her parents an aneurism when she called to tell them. 

She was always an explorer, and this was new terrain. She’d been on her own most of her life. This was no different. Which is why she had no qualms when a nice man with a bushy mustache and a belly that just about hung over his belt offered her a post in a town called Purgatory. 

When she pulled up to her very own little blue house and unlocked the front door with her very own key, it was all so very permanent, so very stable in a way she had never felt. The land was just as she remembered it: flat and empty and smooth. But if school had taught her anything, it was that she was sure she could find secrets buried under all that flatness.

Well, school, and the plethora of unsolved murder cases.

+++

The nice man with the round belly and a caterpillar on his face was Sheriff Randy Nedley. He reminded Nicole of herself, even if he bought awful coffee for the station and had Nicole on the night shift for a week. 

He was soft under all that gruffness, and over months of observing, Nicole felt something warm and tender, like she’d discovered another hidden story. It was nice, she decided, and when Nedley took her to Happy Hour at Shorty’s Saloon one night after work, she went with a wry smile and a full wallet.

They tucked themselves in a booth to watch the patrons come and go. A woman with short-cropped salt and pepper hair, who introduced herself to Nicole as Gus, took their order and tutted when Nedley requested a burger to go with his beer, looking him up and down. 

“You’d better be watching your cholesterol numbers, Randy. Your daughter'll have my head if she finds out you aren’t sticking to your diet,” Gus chided with a wink in Nicole’s direction. 

Nedley huffed, “Chrissy ain’t here, and what she don’t know won’t kill her.” 

“Guess I’ll have to prep it myself then, ‘cause you and I both know if Waverly finds out, she’ll sure as hell tell her.” Gus jerked her thumb over her shoulder back in the direction of the bar, where a petite young woman with hair like the ocean poured a drink for an older man seated to her right. She laughed just a little too loudly at something he said, and Nicole’s heart leapt.

Secrets in Purgatory, indeed.

+++

And she didn’t even know about the demons.

+++

Nicole had a list of sights she wanted to see before she died: Mount Fuji, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Grand Canyon among them. The bottom of a ditch on the outskirts of Purgatory was, most unfortunately, not on the list. It wasn’t that bad down there, she thought in the moments before the blacked out.

Waking up in Purgatory General with bruised ribs, a sprained wrist, and a concussion to one Waverly Earp biting her fingernails at the end of her bed wasn’t that bad either. The nurse that had to calmly explain to Nicole that she died disagreed.

Nedley stormed into the room with a vigor Nicole had never seen, hovering by her side and shooing off the Black Badge agents who tried to interview her. She was grateful and all, but the silent pleas in Waverly’s eyes made Nicole’s choice for her. 

“Sheriff. I’m good. I want to help,” Nicole murmured, morphine slowing her words.

Nedley just sighed, unsurprised by her stubbornness. “I’ll make sure that cat of yours is fed.” 

“She doesn’t really like men,” Nicole informed him seriously. Her tongue was heavy. 

“Well, who does?” The corner of Nedley’s mustache twitched in amusement. That same tenderness bloomed in Nicole’s chest, the kind she used to feel when she reached the end of a long hike or successfully crossed a river. Or maybe it was the pain. 

Who’s to say.

Waverly Earp left in tears, and Nicole’s heart clenched in a way that had nothing to do with bruised ribs and a concussion.

+++

Waverly Earp kissed her.

Waverly Earp kissed her in Nedley’s office, and Nicole was flying.

+++ 

Nicole figured being shot by your kinda-girlfriend’s back-from-the-dead older sister was probably pretty high on the list of “Worst Ways To Meet Her Family.” But in the same night, Nicole protected the town from a madman, a hundred-year-old cowboy told her supernatural creatures were real, and Waverly Earp begged Wynonna to trade a demon-killing gun for Nicole’s life. And Wynonna had done it.

That was love, Nicole decided, laying on the floor of the bullpen. Sometimes, as Nicole came to learn, connection weren’t all friendship bracelets and cigarette smoke. Sometimes, it was being let in on a secret and frantic kisses between breathy gasps and a jacket thrown at her face. It was missteps and doublin’ back and flippin’ the map over because you might be readin’ it upside down. It was picking up a rock and rinsin’ it off and runnin’ your fingers over each pockmark and crack and needin’ to know every story and every secret.

Willa’s bullet had not broken skin and bone, but to Nicole, it felt as if Willa had shot her very soul, piercing a hole in her core. It did not hurt. Rather, it was liberating. Crystal poked out of a hard rock shell, beautiful and shining. 

+++

Later, after sulfurous kisses, poison blood, DNA tests, new life, and far too many wives both living and undead, Nicole thought that maybe she’d had enough of discoverin’ secrets. She had a family in the Earps and Dolls and Doc and Nedley, and for the first time, the idea of adventurin’ alone felt lonelier than it ever had. 

Hand in hand, Nicole and Waverly forged a path through the wilderness. 

+++

One word and a chance encounter with a widow in black stopped Nicole in her tracks. Bulshar.

Suddenly, she was a little girl huddled at the bottom of a canoe with big moon eyes full of ferocious fear. 

Dolls gave her BBD files about massacres, but she didn’t connect all the dots until Wynonna showed her an old photograph of a younger Nedley with a caterpillar mustache and his arm around a sweet-potato-haired girl. 

Nicole embraced him with tears in her eyes and it felt like comin’ home.

She didn’t get much time to focus on it though because the next thing she knew, the apocalypse had come to Purgatory, and Waverly was dead-set on sacrificin’ herself to stone steps Nicole couldn’t even see. 

There were something to be said for standin’ your ground, Nicole thought. Settling yourself and refusing to move with the whims of nature was a powerful thing, letting the current move around you rather than moving with it. 

But only when you chose the circumstances. 

Wynonna drugging her in the homestead kitchen was a riptide dragging her back out to sea when she’d only just reached land. 

Then Waverly was gone and Nicole was alone. 

This time, though, she was prepared. Every canyon and mountain and valley and rivers she’d formed was the mark of a life full of people she had come to love. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to give that up without a fight. 

The little girl with big moon eyes that saw secrets in galaxies was molded by roadmaps and peanut butter sandwiches and smoke. She changed and adapted and became a steadfast woman with an iron will who knew the pain of being abandoned and refused to be left behind again.

Nicole Haught was stone.

**Author's Note:**

> tl;dr: beauty is in the eye of the person who really likes rocks. 
> 
> thank you again to EFA Podcast for the prompt.
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/way_haughtdamn) and [Tumblr](https://wayhaught-haughtdamn.tumblr.com)


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